God hath respect to the offering of Abel, and rejects that of Cain: Cain kills his brother; God denounces sentence upon him for his fratricide. The posterity of Cain. Lamech's address to his wives. The birth of Seth from Adam; of Enos from Seth.
GENERAL REFLECTIONS. on Chap. IV. and V.
CHAP. IV. One of the most fatal effects of the fall of Adam was to derive a depravity upon his whole posterity, whereof the tragical end of Abel was the first unfortunate example. The birth of her first son had filled Eve with pleasure: but this was not the last time that children, whose coming into the world has caused transports of joy to those from whom they received their birth, have brought sorrow and bitterness to them all their life after.
The two first brothers ought to have been united by the strictest bonds of friendship: all the fields, all the products thereof, yea, the whole earth was theirs. No handle was there for those public divisions, which in the following ages have been so fatal to society; nor for those private quarrels which have passed from parents to children, and been transmitted as an inheritance throughout their families. Nevertheless, fatal force of envy! Cain was the murderer of his brother Abel!
How deceitful are the judgments formed upon the external appearances of men! Who would not have believed in seeing these inhabitants of the first world; both of them sons of the same family; both of them acknowledging the true object of religious worship; both of them, in appearance, animated with the same desire of paying their homage to him; who, I say, would not have thought that they were equally acceptable in his sight? Nevertheless, one of them makes an offering pleasing to the Great Searcher of hearts, while the other is rejected by him! It is God alone who can judge of the heart: and since he discerns its inmost secrets, how vain to approach him with dissimulation and hypocrisy! O God, in all our addresses to thee, give us true faith, pure hearts, and right intentions! for thou wilt accept, we are assured, no services, but such as are brought by persons who more or less possess these pious dispositions; whom sometimes thou sufferest to be oppressed by the wicked: a proof, from the very first, that piety must look for its reward in another and better state than this.
The innocence of a good man is often a sufficient reason to draw upon him the hatred of a bad one; the virtues of the good are the reproaches of the wicked. Cain could not bear with patience the distinction made between him and his brother! his anger was kindled against him, because God justified him; and the apology, proceeding from so powerful a Being, redoubled the jealousy which it ought to have extinguished, and hastened the enormity which it ought to have prevented! But God's justice was not to be eluded: indeed men's contempt of the goodness of God will always formidably arm his justice against them.
The same principle, which leads wicked men to commit crimes in hopes of impunity, throws them into despair upon the denunciation of punishment. Cain was in the utmost dread of sinking under the weight of the threatened and intolerable chastisements. But God, who remembers to have compassion even in the midst of his anger, vouchsafed to remove that apprehension, though he removed not the horror and remorse which always attend a guilty conscience; the dread and certainty of which ought to be sufficient to deter men from atrocious villainy.